An Experimental Investigation of Elastic-Plastic Pulse Propagation in Aluminum Rods

Experiments are reported involving elastic-plastic pulses due to explosive loading at one end of long, annealed, commercially pure, aluminum rods at room temperature and at elevated temperatures up to 750 deg F. The stress waves were detected by a condenser microphone at the far end of the rod and, in some cases, by strain gages at a cross section distant from the impact end. The essential features of the recorded velocity-time profiles and strain-time profiles are found to be in agreement with the predictions of rate independent elastic-plastic theory which takes a Bauschinger effect into account. At room temperature, the reference dynamic stress-strain curve does not differ appreciably from the quasi-static stress-strain curve whereas at elevated temperatures there appears to be a marked difference between the dynamic and quasi-static stress-strain curves. The experiments also serve to determine the dynamic proportional limit which is found to be fairly insensitive to temperature. Since the maximum plastic strains are small at cross sections remote from the impact end, the measurements, and consequently the conclusions, are limited to small strains beyond the proportional limit.